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An overview of keyword density

By Rebecca Holloway, Monday, 5th March 2007

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Keyword density is an indicator of the number of times the selected keyword appears in the web page. But mind you, keywords shouldn't be over used, but should be just sufficient enough to appear at important places.

If you repeat your keywords with every other word on every line, then your site will most likely be rejected as an artificial site or spam site.

Keyword density is always expressed as a percentage of the total word content on a given web page.

Suppose, for example, you have 100 words on your webpage (not including HMTL code used for writing the web page), and you use a certain keyword for five times in the content. The keyword density on that page is found simply by dividing the total number of keywords by the total number of words that appear on your web page. So here it is 5 divided by 100 = .05. Because keyword density is a percentage of the total word count on the page, multiply the above by 100, and that is 0.05 x 100 = 5%

The accepted standard for a keyword density is between 3% and 5%, to get recognized by the search engines. You generally should not exceed this limit.

Remember, that this rule applies to every page on your site. It also applies to not just to one keyword but also a set of keywords that relates to a different product or service. The keyword density should always be between 3% and 5%.

Simple steps to check the density:

* Copy and paste the content from an individual web page into a word-processing software program like Word or Word Perfect.

* Go to the 'Edit' menu and click 'Select All'. Now go to the 'Tools' menu and select 'Word Count'. Write down the total number of words in the page.

* Now select the 'Find' function on the 'Edit' menu. Go to the 'Replace' tab and type in the keyword you want to find. 'Replace' that word with the same word, so you don't change the text.

* When you complete the replace function, the system will provide a count of the words you replaced. That gives the number of times you have used the keyword in that page.

* Using the total word count for the page and the total number of keywords you can now calculate the keyword density.

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About The Author

Rebecca Holloway is an experienced SEO writer who has written several articles on the subject. She works as an article writer for GhostWriterExpress, which provides article, press release and ebook writing services.

Previously on SearchEngineChannel

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